ST. LUKE AS ARTIST.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] read with great pleasure your able and exhaustive article in the Spectator of February 1st on " St. Luke as Artist," more particularly that part of it which dealt with his literary ability and high education. I am reminded by it of a booklet published some ten years ago by a well-known resident of Cambridge, whom many of this and the last generation of students at that University will remember with regret, proving that the author of the Acts must have been well acquainted with the phraseology of Thucydides and others of the beat Greek writers. I am tempted to give an instance, which I quoted to Mr. Hamblin Smith, of a rather recondite idiom employed by St. Luke, the use of a neuter in place of a passive. The Greek authors of the best age would say 016yEtto DrS ZIY0;, Z7r0 TZIV s'Al7sw, meaning to be banished, where one would expect itexaccOnmat, and similarly tizoGartir L'ZS ZifeVOTLy,to be put to death by them. In the shipwreck account we read tiwix4am Tea CYZOISIIM Tic OXI&Pnc, xal fi'ittOLLY Otiagir 47E0E19, where the Authorised and Revised Versions translate the last words " let ber fall off," a rendering superficially, and only superficially, equivalent to the originaL But I hold that they really mean "let her drive ashore," "be cast up," as the boat certainly would do on a lee shore with a gale blowing. So that kweafir is used for ixi3AsGioat. I could mention other instances of the use of extremely idiomatic Greek by St. Luke and St. Paul in his Epistles, which I venture to think have been overlooked by the Revisers in spite of their having among their number such a consummate Greek scholar as Bishop Ellicott —I am, Sir, &c., A. G. DAY.
Sunninghili, Thorpe-newt-Norwich.
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